Monday, April 27, 2009

Playing With Rhythm Games

Since I didn't want to do any homework, I spent today building a basic rhythm game.

All it does is create dots on the right side of the screen and move them left. One dot is the target dot, and the rest have their alpha set at .5 to distinguish them. If an arrow key is pressed, it checks the target dot for two things: First to see if the key pressed is the same as on the dot, second to see if it's in the center circle. If both are true, it tells you that you were successful. Otherwise it tells you that you missed. In addition, if you fail to hit any keys before the target leaves the center circle, you miss. Either way, the next dot in line becomes the target.

It's interesting to make quickie prototypes like these, just to see what the different genres are like. The product was a weak DDR ripoff, but now when I come back to the genre in the future, I'll have a better knowledge base to work from, as well as some code I could probably steal.

I think my next quickie project will be a platformer. I haven't made one of those yet in Flash, and they can be tricky. I'll probably talk more about platformers later when we discuss game ideas, but the best platformers feel incredibly smooth, and that can be hard to do.

About Boosh Studios

We're a team of amateur game developers studying at Champlain College. Our team consists of Mark D., Ray Ortgiesen and Josh Terry, and we're looking to develop Flash games for online distribution. Our first release is currently projected for the end of May.